Digital photography trumping film for good?

Digital cameras first became available to consumers in 1990. Now, 20 years later, we have them in our phones, our computers and our cars.

But for those of you who don't remember, there was a medium that existed before the digital age.

An entire generation has grown up never having had their picture taken by a film camera. Film harkens back to a time when photography was an art and photographers were master craftsmen.

Ansel Adams was 14 when he used a Kodak Brownie to take his first picture back in 1916 in Yosemite Park.

Adams bought his film to the family-owned Adolph Gasser's in San Francisco.

John Gasser, owner of the shop today, says of the time, "The greats took a lot of time to learn how to do it right."

Amateur photographers have been pointing and shooting since 1888 and film cameras have given us some of the most enduring images of the twentieth century. But analysts speculate that analog or film-based photography will largely disappear from the U.S. market within the next decade.

Gasser explained, "Most of the digital cameras now is 90 percent of the market, 10 percent is film, and the 10 percent that's film is used cameras."

Ten years ago, according to market research company InfoTrends, Americans took 26 billion photographs with film cameras. They'll take just 1.4 billion this year. As for digital shots, 80 billion photos that will be taken this year.

David Haueter, associate director of InfoTrends, told CBS News, "We estimate that this year there's around 36 million digital cameras being sold and on top of that you have about 200 million camera phones and smartphones that have a digital camera."

Bobbi Baker Burrows, director of photography at LIFE Books has been in the photo department at the publication for the past 45 years.

Burrows told CBS News, "I hate to say this but everyone is a photographer nowadays. They keep taking, shooting, shooting, and shooting. And chances are yes, there is gonna be a good photograph there, but they're not really thinking."

She shared the importance of photo negatives through the legacy of famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.

"When Eisenstaedt shot (the iconic V-Day image of a soldier and nurse kissing in New York's Times Square), he didn't even realize how significant it was at the time. He thought black against white, that'll make a good picture. And then he forgot about it," she said.

Burrows continued, "I know photographers who actually went back through their negatives and found some very significant moments that had been tossed. And if they had had a digital camera at the time it would've been gone forever. It might've been deleted."

But it isn't just the film that's being eliminated.The machinery used to develop film is also going the way of the 8-track tape.

Parsons, a design school in New York City, is downsizing its dark rooms to accommodate for more digital technologies.

Jim Ramer, MFA photography director at Parsons The New School for Design says as time passes machines that help produce film will become rarer and rarer.

Ramer said he does square off with purists who do not want to make the switch. He says he tells them that the language is always evolving.

"This is just another step in its evolution," he said.

Not unlike the diehards who prefer their parents' vinyl records over mp3 downloads, a Parsons group of student photographers aren't quite ready to hand over their beloved clunkers.

One student told Doane she likes hearing the click of the camera.

"It's stopping time," she said.

Burrows said she looks forward to a day when film is rediscovered.

"There will be a day when somebody opens a drawer and looks in it and says, 'What is this? Do you know what this is?' And somebody else will pull it out and put their fingers on it and say, 'I don't know. I think they call them negatives.'"

Doane added on "The Early Show" that film-issue cameras have seen their sales tumble in the past ten years from 20 million to 280,000.

He said the Parsons students they talked to said they really loved those distinctive whirls and clicks their old film-issue cameras made - sound effects that the digital medium has borrowed to make the picture taking experience seem more authentic.